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Panel Work

Wow! First of all, I have to go back and adjust the colors. Second, you actually have your own TBM! Amazing!

Most of the day was spent getting "water" into the water feature on the layout. But I did get to do just a few things on the TBM. I first glued all the control panel layers together with PSA. I then went back and put a couple of dabs of thin CA since there were some gaps that needed to be tightened up.

I dropped it on the floor and the small red T-handle PE parts disappeared. I don't know if I'll worry about it.

I put together the pilots seat and painted it O.D. although it's probably interior green. I then glued up two of the side panels. Instead of using the PE parts, i made my own using 0.021" brass rod with round balls created with medium CA.

Tomorrow I'll adjust the panel colors and keep going on the cockpit parts.

Colors Adjusted...

Because of that great picture, I was able to adjust the colors on the panel to as closely match the picture as possible.

After doing this I was reading ahead in the instructions and looking where the cockpit floor (which supports the entire engine/firewall assembly) joins to the bomb bay ceiling. It's a critical joint that takes places on a thin edge in the front and vertical plate in the rear. It's so critical that it would be hard (for me) to get a good strong joint when all the other stuff is glued in place. After staring at it for a while, I concluded that it could be safely glued in place now to ensure it was a strong joint.

I also came to this conclusion since the engine as I modified it, was interfering with the front edge of the bomb bay floor. That oil line that I put it was right smack in the way. I had to carve a bit away so the line would clear and this added stress to the cockpit floor joint which was another reason to glue it now.

In this picture you can see the front thin joint. That has to fuse properly. The other place the engine is supported is the firewall to fuselage side joint. That's going to provide most of the support.

Next up will be more cockpit componets moving rearward to the radio compartments.

ABM Cockpit Work

While I did this work yesterday, I'm just getting around to post it. I did some more mountain work and while the epoxy "water" was curing, I did get some ADM work done.

I began to realize that air brushing the cockpit was problematic based on the various colored pieces that needed to be glued in, and some parts were actually partially hidden by parts that were interior green. So I've been brush painting the green. It takes two coats, but looks decent. I'll do some aging and wearing on it to kill the "newness". Here's a case in point. That radio set buried in the structure that sits behind the pilot. And those oxygen bottles...

The main part of the cockpit has two consoles mounted to the floor and I decorated them with little bits of paint. The right-hand one in real life is all chrome toggle switches and circuit breakers on the side. I briefly entertained the thought of actually inserting pieces of High-E guitar string to simulate those switches and then as quickly disabused myself of that stupid idea since that panel will be partially hidden by the tumble-home of the fuselage sides and basically invisible. It wasn't worth breaking expensive 0.010" carbide drills to do it.

The control sticks will be painted next session.

Here's the opposite side view.

I finished the mountain and all its water features today. So take a look at my other long-running thread.

Yesterday's Post

I don't know why WAB is dropping the last post I put up, but it happened on Wednesday's post and it happened again yesterday. So here's yesterday's post and then I'll attempt to add today's.

Hi gang! Holiday trips are over. We spent the time from Christmas through New Years with family and friends in the Philly area and State College, PA. Got to do some ABM work today. I'm in a hold on the layout waiting for the laser cutting for a new Bernheim Distillery that is to go into Heaven Hills' "Evan Williams Bourbon Experience" in downtown Louisville.

I continued work on the upper fuse interior and put the parts into the bomb bay as well.

I just placed it into the right fuse half to see what fit where. It's a very nice fit indeed. I need to add some cabling since all the black boxes on top will be visible through the large greenhouse canopy. You can also see that I finished painting the flight stick with the red pickle switches on it.

I glued together the left side cockpit wall, added some brass levers, and let it all dry before painting. The bright spots you see is me rushing to take the shot before the paint dried flat

I then turned the assembly over and mounted in the Panavise to glue in all the bomb bay details. The instructiions didn't have the upper pieces glued in yet, but I found it better to put them in while painting them. I'm going to air brush the interior green in this area since it has so many vertical surfaces sticking up.

You have several choices for load out: extra fuel tank, bomb load or torpedo. I'm going with the torpedo since the Avenger was first and foremost a torpedo bomber, and the torpedo is more interesting to look at. I'll keep working on this stuff as long as I can.

ABM: More Interior Work

Work continues on interior. Masked the upper parts that I didn't want to get any more interior green on, and first gave a primer coat of Tamiya Gray Surfacer. I was finding that the Model Master acrylics were not sticking very well to the styrene. I generally do not wash my styrene before starting to work. I just feel it's more trouble than it's worth and could lead to parts loss and breakage. That being said, I suspect, there's mold release on the parts causing the adhesion problem. The Tamiya primer, on the other hand, has not trouble sticking and provides a good surface for the subsequent coats. Unfortunately, it's solvent based and I have to spray very sparingly as to not smelling up the house. It's way too cold outside to do any painting out there. I'm still lobbying for that spray booth.

I then sprayed the entire bomb bay, the rear radio compartment and the nose portion interior green, then went back and picked out some detail parts with chromate yellow, flat black and knobs of different colors. All this taping and handling broke the control stick off at the base. I waited until all the work was done, drilled it with a microscopic #88 (0.0095") and secured it with a piece of high E guitar string, also 0.010".

I then got to work finishing up the pilot's seat with the PE seat belts that were included in the kit and ended up using medium CA to secure the seat into the cockpit.

Next week, I'll continue working on all these interiors bits. I cleaned off the nubs on the fuselage halves and was very happy with the fit and alignment. Very little filling appears to be needed.

Interesting that your cockpit shows a two level position behind the pilot and in front of the gun turret. On a TBM-3E that position is open and even has built in facilities to add another stick if so desired. The mountings are there in mine. To the left side the large ARB receiver was placed on a platform. The right side of the fuselage had a passageway from the radio man's position to up in that area behind the pilot. I'll get more pictures tomorrow. Right now this one shows the area directly under the turret. The collector for the turret cables is gone. The radios are in my storage area. The gauges that go below the big ART-13 radio are in storage. What you see against the bulkhead is the hydraulic system for the plane.

TBM3fan, having you as a reader and resource is priceless! I notice that all the knobs on the equipment are generally black. Leaving the faces of that equipment black would be, frankly, boring. So while painting them more interesting colors is not prototypical, it's certainly more fun to look at.

Keep those pictures coming.

There is a passageway from the radio compartment up behind the radio rack and into the cockpit.

TBM: Access Panel

Late start but still productive. Built the torpedo and sprayed it with rattle-can Tamiya Natural Metal spray. Tomorrow I'll mask the nose and paint it insignia red. I also mounted the little support bracket for this load out option into the bomb bay ceiling. Then I remembered that I wanted to open an access panel in front of the firewall to show off the rear of the enging. I used the new fine razor saw I bought at MicroMark which worked very well to make very fine straight cuts with very little effort. After cleaning up the edges I glued some 0.080" X 0.010" Evergreen styrene strip as the backing edge that you see when these panels are removed. Often they're held with Dzus fasteners. I spaced out and drilled some faux mounting holes with a #75 drill. The holes are not in scale, but they'd be almost invisible in scale.

I test fit the engine in position and quickly found that the .010" thick new plastic held the firewall out of position and would have created a problem when joining the fuse halves. So I removed the same amount of material off the firewal so it restored the proper orientation. I did this by first scribing the offset line with a divider and then removed most of the material with the Dremel and a sanding drum...very carefully since the engine and all that details is essentially a finished product and I didn't want to destroy anything.

TBM3fan, having you as a reader and resource is priceless! I notice that all the knobs on the equipment are generally black. Leaving the faces of that equipment black would be, frankly, boring. So while painting them more interesting colors is not prototypical, it's certainly more fun to look at.

Keep those pictures coming.

There is a passageway from the radio compartment up behind the radio rack and into the cockpit.

I believe tbmfan is being modest; if I'm not mistaken, he's actually done most of the work on that aircraft. If you've ever seen that aircraft (and I have, several times), it is pristine; I'm not a huge WWII buff, but my son is, and he insists on seeing that particular aircraft whenever we're onboard.

I have some older pictures of the TBM somewhere, I think they're on my computer at home; if I have a chance, I'll post them tonight.

"There is never enough time to do or say all the things that we would wish. The thing is to try to do as much as you can in the time that you have. Remember Scrooge, time is short, and suddenly, you're not there any more." -Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge

TBM: Ball Turret

Thanks guys!

In looking at the coloration of the Mk 13 and especially the rough cast appearance of the warhead, my coloration is pretty far off, unless it was going to be a museum display.

First thing I did was mask and paint the torpedo's nose Vallejo red. I forced dried the first coat and let the second coat air dry. I find Vallejo, unlike other acrylics, flashes off, but is still tacky (and easy to get fingerprints) for many hours (24). Tamiya dries without tackiness very quickly as does Model Master acrylics. Model Tech is somewhere in between. Life Color also dries quickly. So I set it aside and didn't mess around with it. I did place it in the bomb bay for this pic. This should get some weathering to make it a little more worldly. With the new info, I may go back and repaint this critical piece of the model.

Next up was the single Browning 50cal electric gun turret. It surprises me that the Avengers designers spent so much effort on making a fully capable electrically driven gun turret, but kept it at a single barrel.

This is a very nice feature of this model and how Trumpeter likes to engineer them. They don't leave anything out. Since some many layers needed to be laid up, and some of the parts buried in said layers were not interior green, I was forced to hand paint it as I went along so I could actually paint the insides and the differing colors.

With the pic of the real turret that TBF posted I was able to be confident with the turret colors.

Here's what I got done today. Clearly, I didn't get it all painted yet.

I tried something new, more or less successfully. I had reported that I bought those micro-tubes from Sprue Brothers and I always like to drill out gun barrels, especially in 1:32. I measured the barrel that was protruding from the heat shield and it was 0.038". One of the tubes was exactly the same diameter, but its i.d. was too big, but the next telescoping tube in the series looked good for the i.d. So I clipped the existing barrel stub and drilled it out in two steps to accept the larger tube, into which I inserted the smaller one. Came out pretty good.

Should have the turret finished up tomorrow.

I found this on the web built by Soren Wolf. Seems he had the same thoughts on the torpedo color as I do. I like how it looks and will probably leave it alone.